Site: Bernal Heights
Two earthquake shacks were connected in a T-shape to produce this house. The house was origninally all redwood, but had been changes many times throughout the years with increasingly unpleasant renovations.

Design Objectives: Make a 600 Square Foot Home Livable, Make an Old Home feel New
The client saw the potential in this tiny, chopped-up home with the incredibly low ceilings. He wanted to make the house contemporary and clean, open and light-filled.

Although the house has historic significance and can't be altered much on the exterior, we were free to completely gut the interior and (except for the location of the bathroom and bedrooms) start from scratch.

Solution: Open up Everything, Make it Warm
The ceilings were hiding a pre-existing ceiling which was hiding an uninsulated attic. By "cathedralling" the ceiling using the existing attic configuration and adding skylights above we were able to make smaller spaces feel large. In plan, we removed partition walls and laid out the kitchen, living, and dining areas as a "great room".

Where we opened the ceilings we used a warm redwood reminiscent of the original house. The existing redwood ceiling had been preserved for re-use, but its condition was more suitable for the exterior deck, so we used recycled redwood decking on the ceilings.

Contractor
Bay Area General Construction (contact Javier Claudio) 650.991.0641

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